OpenStreetMap

National Park Rendering Issue

Posted by Sunfishtommy on 16 June 2016 in English.

So I have been going on a mapping spree lately mapping the outer banks of North Carolina, but What I have begun to notice is the national park boundaries are covering up all the detail out there. Many parts of islands are simply specifically their coastlines, are covered with these giant green blobs called National Parks. Here is an example at Portsmouth Island

What is even more frustrating, is this rendering issue has already been solved, when looking at lakes around borders of national parks, we see the green get covered by the water, with only a green shaded line remaining above the water to represent the border of the national park. Here is an example at Fontana Lake. Is there anyway we can fix this, It seems like a simple fix, just get national parks over oceans to render the same way as national parks over lakes.

Is there any reason this cant be done?

I have thought of a couple work arounds, like making the border of the national parks the islands, or putting an area of water over the area affected by the green blob issue, so it would be rendered correctly, but I realized that this would be mapping for the render which is a no no.

So how do we get this fixed?

Edit: I think I found the problem, For some reason many of the national parks are labeled with the tag leisure=park. the wiki page clearly says this is not the appropriate way to tag National parks. The solution seems to be to go through and remove the tag leisue=park, which will fix the rendering issue, as well as follow best practices.

Discussion

Comment from Alan Bragg on 16 June 2016 at 14:16

A border off shore is hard to verify. I’ve been updating Acadia NP where the border is the seashore. I’m using the national park #parktiles imagery. Their image is closer to the Bing imagery and better than the saw tooth “coastline” way. I’ve been using JOSM to move the coastline onto the park boundary way. I’m thinking the best approach would be to accurately trace the Bing coast and make it part of the National Park relation. Thanks for posting.

Comment from Warin61 on 17 June 2016 at 03:06

There may be (legal) differences between NP boundaries and coastlines. I would not move them unless I knew what was what with the park boundaries.. and coastline is high tide?

There are also ‘Marine National Parks too - some of which may not touch land.

Rendering… which has priority land cover or land use? Are both transparent so that other features can appear - e.g. a bench, shelter, gust house… ?

Possibly someone thinks that the rendering with the tag leisure=park is better than without it… contact the mapper who placed the tag?

Comment from Sunfishtommy on 17 June 2016 at 05:38

The Wiki page clearly says that Leisure=park should not be used for national parks

The normal view of a park is a green area within a town or cities. Parks in rural locations (e.g., areas named “National parks”) are a totally different kind of thing. leisure=nature_reserve and boundary=national_park could be used, and not this leisure=park tag. example. There is also this proposal: boundary=protected_area.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure%3Dpark

I am going to away the leisure = park feature, because it obviously does not belong. I would suspect it was added because at one point national parks were not rendering, so the person wanted the park to render.

https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/39214/national-park-not-rendered-in-standard-layer

It is incorrect, and we see how it creates problems, so i a going to start taking it off.

Comment from JimmyRocks on 17 June 2016 at 20:42

These boundaries seem to be the same as the ones used by the NPS for their web maps and the upcoming Cape Hatteras app. Although I think the bigger issue is that the rendering is a solid color when the boundary includes both land and sea. The NPS uses a transparent fill on its maps, and I think that’s the best approach.

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